King's College Cambridge lowers its hammer and sickle. Is student radicalism dead?

A symbol of evil but also of the youthful determination to remake the world.

I have some very bad memories of the Lefties at Cambridge. Not because I hated them but because I was one. Oooooo, the memories are painful. Rallies in the rain, violent occupations, a failed experiment at living in a squat (God bless the police for bringing that to an end), a ton of couscous and a mountain of Marijuana. How we ever thought getting high and singing Bandiera Rossa would change the world, I don't know. But boy, we tried.

But times they are a-changing, and the King's student union has woken up to how offensive its hammer and sickle actually is. Interestingly, it took a girl from the former Eastern bloc to do it. From the Cambridge News:

Linguistics student Lisa Karlin, whose family lived in Ukraine while it was controlled by USSR, proposed the motion to the JCR (junior common room) student body two weeks ago. Speaking to the News, she said: “It’s not that the flag is a Communist symbol, but it’s that it specifically represents the Soviet Union … The flag makes me uncomfortable, because of everything it stands for, and all the atrocities that were committed under that flag."

The atrocities include forced famines, gulags, executions of political opponents, brainwashing, the outlawing of religious freedom and grinding poverty. The Soviet Union was generated and maintained by terror and I am ashamed to have ever once thought Marxism was a legitimate alternative to democratic capitalism.

So the false flag of communism is gone. But what will replace it? Well, it seems that student politics has evolved from idiocy to dullness. Quote:

Students will vote on a new flag early next year, with a rainbow flag and a purple and white hammer and sickle among the suggestions.

A rainbow flag? How bourgeois.

For all its many evils, at least the hammer and sickle represents the natural rebelliousness of youth allied with the desire to tear the world down and start all over again. By contrast, the rainbow flag represents the politics of identity, of the melting pot, of pacifism, of "me-me-me" and all that self-indulgent liberal bullsh*t that thinks we can learn something from dolphins. It stands for compromise over conflict; an ego at peace with itself rather than one which rages against injustice.

And this, I suspect, says a lot about the changing politics of our youth. Of course, we should be happy to see the death of ideologies that were fundamentally wrong. But that doesn't mean we should welcome the death of ideology per se. And the triumph of rainbow flag liberalism does, sadly, represent the end of serious philosophical debate. Whereas students once went to university purely to shut them down (that gag copyright to Absolutely Fabulous), now there's a worrying trend towards hard work and moderate politics. The few issues that do arise from the modern campus are self-absorbed (scrap tuition fees etc). There is little evidence of a new generation of Jerry Rubins, Tom Haydens or Danny le Rouges. No, the true radicals on the Cambridge campus today probably aren't on the Left. They're the bow-tied libertarians and the bright-eyed evangelicals on the Right.

All of the above might seem contradictory. Why would an anti-communist pleased to see the back of the hammer and sickle bemoan the lack of Leftist radicalism? Partly because the desire to uproot society is a natural part of being young. But mostly because some of that Leftist radicalism has done good. It was young people who took Freedom Rides in the 1960s to protest racial segregation and it was an army of young people who took to the streets to end Vietnam. The revolutionary spirit of the adolescence, directed to true moral purpose, can elevate society.